What can you do to enable better conversations across the organisation to maximise customer value?

Introduction

How do you help people in a growing organisation work better together to deliver more value to its customers? The starting point is to understand the current situation, how we work today and what we are working on. So how do you provide visibility that enables people and teams to have informed conversations at any given time and respond to change quickly? Changing how we work, however, is no easy task. In fact, it carries all the complexity and intrigue of a Phoenix Project sequel: software creation, interdependencies among teams, various business units, changing leadership, integration after an acquisition, disparate locations, intense competition, a fast-paced, dynamic environment… and of course—the most complicated variable of all—people!

That’s the challenge we faced here at Nexmo, the Vonage API Platform. Nexmo was a start up that had grown incredibly fast and had just been acquired by Vonage when I started with the company. Feedback from the Product and Engineering teams identified transparency as the key problem to solve for. We needed to make the delivery processes, work in progress and dependencies between teams visible to all. We received similar feedback from other parts of the business as nearly every business unit across the company touched product development in some way, yet the ever-changing status of any given product was a mystery to many teams across the company. Our Product Managers had to improve the way they worked to be more effective in this complex and uncertain environment. Our objective was to make all the work in product development across all the teams transparent, for engineering as well as non-engineering teams, to help starting to solve some of these problems.

Here is what we’ve done so far to realise that objective.

How we structure our work

Every new piece of product work starts off with an idea or a request. The request can come from anywhere in the organisation, but should be in line with the larger goals of the Product Team. Once a request is qualified, it becomes an initiative. We break down larger initiatives into smaller work items in order to reduce the risk of customers not connecting to the product or feature and to deliver in an iterative way that allows us to get constant feedback.

In most cases, more than one team is involved in delivering a product epic, so we break them down further into epics for each of the teams using the following structure:

• Product Goals - These are the larger strategic objectives for the Product Team.
• Product Initiatives - A Product Initiative aims to work towards achieving a Product Goal and is a collection of Product Epics, each of which can span multiple teams.
• Product Epics - This is a piece of work across one or more teams, which can be broken down into Team Epics per team.
• Team Epics - This is a piece of work for a team, which can be broken down into smaller work items for that team.
• Team Stories - This is the smallest work item for a team that delivers value to the end-user.

Breaking down the work

We are using this structure for the work in Product and Engineering and we have started extending this to include non-engineering teams working on a Product Initiative to improve collaboration and coordination.

You might wonder why we have both a Product Initiative level as well as a Product Epic level. Product Initiatives might need intermediate milestones or feedback points within. Having both levels allows us to break them down. We also have Product Initiatives that only require just one Product Epic so over time when Initiatives become smaller and not needing intermediate milestones, we might no longer need both levels.

Product Portfolio - an overview of all the work

People at different levels in the organisation need to have the right information for productive discussions about where the business should focus. This leads to informed decisions about what work to undertake and how to improve how to work together. This information should be available when needed. People close to the work need to have visibility of the smallest detail, while others need access to the information at a higher, aggregate level, to make strategic decisions.

To support the Product Team with delivery and decision making as well as providing better visibility to the rest of the organisation, we built a Product Portfolio. We use Kanban, inspired by Klaus Leopold’s work on Kanban Flight Levels. The view at the Portfolio level consists of two parts, one focused on the more strategic decision making about what to work on next to achieve a Product Goal; the other focused on balancing the work that needs to happen to deliver on all Product Initiatives collectively as a system.

Strategic Product Portfolio - Here we visualise the Product Initiatives per Product Goal. We show the options in the backlog, the ones we want to do next and those in progress. This board helps with the conversation and alignment to the Product Goals, how much we want to invest in each Product Goal, and prioritisation of Product Initiatives.

Tactical Product Portfolio - The objective of the Tactical Product Portfolio is to work in a “systems thinking” way across all Product Initiatives being worked on and planned. We want to tune the system and work better together to deliver more as a collective team than we could if focused only on our own product area. To support this, the Tactical Product Portfolio visualises the status of the Product Epics for all Product Initiatives which are being worked on. It shows the Product Epics that have not yet started, those we want to do next and those in progress. It also shows all the individual teams involved per Product Epic. The visualisation of the Portfolio is a tool to support conversations in the Product Team. The Product Team meets regularly to discuss what’s on the board and what they can do now to address things like blockers and aging tickets.

At team level, the teams of course have their own boards with their stories and tasks. We are in the process of building better boards for the team-of-teams to help them with the coordination across the engineering and non-engineering teams involved to deliver a new product or feature for our users.

Different levels of visualisation we are building at Nexmo to support the conversations across the organisation.

What we built

We built all the boards above in Jira. There are other tools that visualise the work across different levels, however we wanted to start with the tool we had at hand. The different boards are linked together, allowing you to click through from the largest item to the smallest detail and showing full line of sight. The boards are automated so that in case a Team Story completes a Team Epic, also other higher level epics get moved to the next column. Jira is the source of truth and everyone has access to this.

Jira is good to work with, but does not always provide the best visualisation of the overall situation as you would have to scroll and click through to different boards. We therefore also built a large physical Product Portfolio Wall next to the large kitchen in the London office. It is a wall of approximately 6 by 2 meters, full with colourful stickies showing the work. It is here where you can really see in a single overview the prioritisation, the backlog with options, the status of the work at Strategic and Tactical Portfolio level, the actual workflow, team dependencies, data and key policies. It is in front of this board that the entire Product team has their Portfolio conversations. In addition to being a good visual tool for the Product team, the Portfolio wall is also an information radiator that many people come to to have ad-hoc discussions. The big physical board really moved the exercise from process towards people and interactions.

We have been experimenting with limiting work in progress (WIP) at one point in time in order to tune the systems to improve predictability and delivery speed. WIP limits allow you to complete single work items faster by helping your team to focus only on current tasks. We currently are using WIP limits only at the team level to manage capacity, i.e. every team can only commit to and work on a maximum of a certain number of Team Epics at any given time. These are visualised with magnets on the Portfolio wall.

With Jira, we capture data that we load into the tool ActionableAgile. This tool provides insights into how long it takes to deliver things and forecasts when things will be delivered with a certain level of certainty. We now have a good understanding of how long it takes to deliver Product Epics and which Product Epics are aging and therefore at risk. These insights help us to make decisions and changes to improve the situation in real time.

Feedback received

“The new setup has made a huge difference on collaboration between teams and provided two additional benefits to management: first providing visibility into the tradeoffs and decisions made by the team provides additional confidence in our ability to scale. It has also made it much easier for the Product Management team to surface any challenging issues to the leadership team “shorter time to get to the right info, easier to see also context,” said Thomas Soulez, VP Product Strategy.

“The approach optimised and provided a higher level of transparency and understanding of the challenges inherent in a fast-changing environment, enabling Nexmo’s product and development team to adapt faster, with better insight into evolutions as they occurred,” said Sverre Wendelbo, VP Global Pre-Sales Engineering & Customer Success

“One of the roles of Developer Relations at Nexmo is to represent the developer in numerous forums and serve Product needs by creating key developer experience assets such as documentation, libraries and sample code. In the past, we've struggled with visibility and therefore involvement in the product decision making process and with other teams having visibility of our backlog, prioritisation and work in progress. The work that's been undertaken in 2018 to improve visibility of priorities, enable better decision making and raise awareness of work in progress across the organisation has been essential to ensuring we can deliver value to the business,” said Phil Leggetter, Head of Developer Relations.

What’s next

So, we have provided the Product Team with visibility of all the work, with a better understanding of how they work and the dependencies that exist. The naked truth is not always comfortable reading, but with knowledge comes insight and with insight comes action. The Product Team is now more aligned and is having more effective conversations.The rest of the organisation has a better view into what is happening, helping with alignment at higher levels, improving trust, and encouraging better conversations between departments.

Moving forward, the focus will be on extending the value stream and involving more teams at the portfolio level, especially the non-engineering teams. We want to help the team-of-teams with visualising their work to help with the coordination. 

Special thanks to Jose Casal for all his support and the Business Agility team Brett Connor and Mihaela Madzharova!

You can find more details about the journey that got us here in my other blog.